Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Big Ten Expandomania

After years of conference skullduggery, the day Big Ten fans have dreamed about is here.  Maryland and Rutgers have joined the Big Ten, bloating it up to 14 teams and hundreds of possible teams.  For those of you who haven't been diligently following, printing, and annotating the blogspot Northwestern football blog Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat posts for the past several years, this is a positive step in the direction of the creation of the Enormous Ten, an all-encompassing college sports conference that involves every single team in the country with the possible exception of Purdue.   The Enormous Ten football season will play out with a series of regional Tournaments of Roses, eventually culminating in a Big Ten Champion of Champions ladder that involve prestigious Big Ten bowls such as the Rose Bowl, the Alamo Bowl, the Motor City Bowl, and the Big Ten Championship Super Bowl Bowl played at a newly-built luxury sports facility at the exact geographical center of the continental United States, which will be the Big Ten's remit.
 
The Big Ten extends its manifest destiny as it moves east, west, north, south, and a multitude 
of other directions

For football, Maryland and Rutgers will be placed in the Big Ten East, and neither will play Northwestern next season.  It is, however, important to assimilate them into the Big Ten culture as quickly as possible.  Spearheading this effort will be Illinois football coach Tim "Beck" Man, who will also be serving as the inaugural Big Ten Director of Rivalry and Mutual Antagonism.  Here are some leaked documents obtained by BYCTOM contacts in the Illinois athletic department detailing how Beckman plans to welcome Rutgers and Maryland to the greatest athletic conference in the midwest and some parts of the northeast.

EXCLUSIVE LEAKED BECK MAN COMMUNIQUES

The following is a transcript of a series of recordings of conversations held in Tim Beckman's Anti-Wildcat Command Center in an underground bunker underneath Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois.  Voices identified as Jim Delany, Tim Beckman, and an unidentified Illini assistant.

Monday, March 10, 2014, 7:51 AM

DELANY: ...like legends and leaders but with more attitude, you know, like in those doritos commercials.  Like the upstanding young person division but with those rap songs where people announce who they are and what they're going to say.
BECKMAN: [to unknown] I SAID NO PURPLE IN HERE YOU TELL THEM I'M NOT GOING TO PAY FOR THAT DIMETAPP DISPLAY THIS IS ILLINI COUNTRY.  What was that?  Legends?  Leaders?  I get paid to win ball games x 22 rocket right burn evanston hut.
DELANY: Coach as you know, we have two more top-flight educational institutions in the lucrative East Coast television market and the problem is no one here hates them or knows anything about them.  We need you to do what you do best: ban their logos, headbutt photos of their mascots, spit chewing tobacco all over their flags.  Something, leaderous.  Legendary.  [whooshing noise]
UNKNOWN VOICE #1: Your cape just got caught in that smoldering wreckage of Ryan Field model
BECKMAN: I've got no time for those schools out east.  Is one of them Youngstown State?  Because next game is Youngstown State.  You know, Toledo lost to those guys in 1961, and I've been going to zoos and roughing up people in Penguin costumes
DELANY: No, you unhook it at the front, it's held together by that Big Ten Legend Juan Dixon pin
BECKMAN: And the Burgess Meredith people don't understand college football at all and that's why he

[18 minutes of silence]

DELANY: ...but what if we call them the LEASTDERS and the WESTGENDS, I said to the guy I was just spitballing but we're paying you thousands and I just came up with that in five minutes, you know?
BECKMAN: So it's Maryland?  Maryland's easy.  What's in Maryland?  Crabcakes?  I'm going to have an assistant fly out there and bring back a crate full of crabcakes and I'm going to stomp them one by one while dressed as...what's their mascot?
UNKNOWN VOICE: The terrapins.
BECKMAN: Is that some sort of wild cat?
UNKNOWN VOICE: It's a turtle
BECKMAN: A turtle?  Ok, I'm going to stomp on on a bunch of crabcakes while pretending to be controlled by a floating anthropomorphic brain in a gigantic belt.  Done.  What's the other one?
DELANY: Rutgers, a fine educational institution with generations of Big Ten tradition.
BECKMAN: Is that a small, private university?  [suspiciously] Are they purple?
DELANY: They're a state university, and they're scarlet knights.
BECKMAN: Ok, I'm going to joust a guy and rip a flag from, where the hell is Rutgers?  Michigan?  Ohio?  Kentuckey?
DELANY: Jersey
BECKMAN: Jesus Christ.

Intercepted E-mail from Tim Beckman to Jim Delany

Monday, March 10, 11:26 AM
From: r.zook@illinois.edu
To: legendleader14@b1g.org

i am going to win bon jovi's house and im going to burn it

tbman
 
THE NBA IS A VIPER'S NEST OF INTRIGUE AND INNUENDO

Carmelo Anthony is a free agent.  So is LeBron James.  And so are dozens of other of NBA stars, semi-stars, role players, guys who come in for five minutes and elbow people, and Drew Crawford.  Teams like the Bulls and Rockets have been pulling out all the stops, lining their stadiums with Pro-Carmelo propaganda like he has just successfully pulled off a coup d'etat 
 
And at that point Melo knew he loved the Houston Rockets

The NBA's byzantine salary cap has made it extremely difficult to determine whether or not the Bulls can afford to pay him and retain key pieces such as Taj Gibson, Jimmy Butler, the rights to Nikola Mirotic, the crown of Spanish Poneramia, and one of Stacey King's old gym socks.  The Miami Heat are involved in a convoluted dance to re-sign their Big Three at enough of a discount to add another player who does not spend his time between playoff games in a sarcophagus.  Meanwhile, we can all agree that this convoluted player movement is all for naught unless we can get Dwight Gooden one step closer to playing for every team in the Association.

But the most entertaining intrigue this off-season has been with coaches and executives.  Former point guards have been taking advantage of an NBA pilot program to send former players with no coaching experience directly into head coaching positions and somehow this has resulted in bizarre power plays.  Mark Jackson departed Golden State amid allegations of a falling-out with assistant Brian Scalabrine, which would be an incredibly funny development to someone in 2005.  The Warriors then hired Steve Kerr who had been a general manager and now only needs to become a majority owner in order win some sort of NBA job decathlon.  And Jason Kidd, hired months after his retirement, has somehow forced his way out of Brooklyn through a series of attempted power grabs in order to take the reins in Milwaukee.  Kidd's major accomplishments were coaching Brooklyn into the playoffs in an abysmal Eastern conference, tactically spilling a courtside beverage, decisively exiling his rival Lawrence Frank to an abandoned film room, and growing a beard that makes him look like the villain in one of those Iron Man movies.  Usually, this is the place in BYCTOM where I would compare all of this to some sort of early modern Holy Roman Empire situation, but a treacherous Duke was allowed time to scheme in private and not have to deal with twitter rumor-mongering, the NBA salary cap, transnational Russian nickel-mining concerns, and the trauma of having been dunked upon in the recent past.  Thank goodness for professional sports.